Score another bucket list location off my list – the Canadian Rockies and Banff National Park were truly spectacular! The Canadian Rockies are a network of provincial and national parks that collectively make up a UNESCO World Heritage Site. My visit covered mostly Banff and Yoho national parks, in Alberta and British Columbia, and the Icefields Parkway, one of the most scenic drives in the world. The area is known for jagged ice-capped peaks, many well over 12,000 feet, glaciers, glacial-fed alpine lakes and diverse wildlife. Black bear were spotted foraging for berries along the Icefields Parkway. The Rockies form the divide between the Pacific Ocean drainage on the west and that of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean on the east. Notable rivers originating in the Canadian Rockies include the Fraser, Columbia, North Saskatchewan, Bow and Athabasca Rivers.
The Canadian Rockies are quite different in appearance and geology from the American Rockies to the south of them. The Canadian Rockies are composed of layered sedimentary rock such as limestone and shale, whereas the American Rockies are made mostly of metamorphic and igneous rock such as gneiss and granite. The Canadian Rockies are overall more jagged than the American Rockies because the Canadian Rockies have been more heavily glaciated, resulting in sharply pointed mountains separated by wide, U-shaped valleys gauged by glaciers, whereas the American Rockies are overall more rounded, with river-carved V-shaped valleys between them. The Canadian Rockies are taller, cooler and wetter, giving them moister soil, bigger rivers, and more glaciers. The tree line is much lower in the Canadian Rockies than in the American Rockies.
I stayed 7 nights in the pretty village of Lake Louise and dutifully got up at 3:45AM most mornings and four attempts to try to catch the sunrise glow on Victoria Glacier and the reflection in Lake Louise. The first morning met with fog and the glacier was completely obscured, a second morning there was still fog, and only a few bits of the glacier were visible, and then the last two mornings the sunlight was blocked by a cloud of smoke from Siberian fires. What a disappointment; but at least I did capture one sunrise glow on the Mountains comprising the Valley of Ten Peaks and Moraine Lake. On days spent traveling the Icefields Parkway I captured beautiful reflective waters in the many alpine lakes and staggeringly impressive glaciated peaks. I also was able to sample some of the best cuisine the area has, including a dinner at the Post Hotel in Lake Louise.
[Geology: The Rocky Mountains took shape during an intense period of plate tectonic activity. During the Paleozoic (541-252 Ma), western North America lay underneath a shallow sea, which deposited many kilometers of limestone and dolomite. By the close of the Mesozoic (252-66 Ma), 10,000 to 15,000 feet of sediment accumulated in 15 recognized formations. During the last half of the Mesozoic Era, much of today’s California, British Columbia, Oregon, and Washington were added to North America. Western North America suffered the effects of repeated collision as the Kula and Farallon plates sank beneath the continental edge. Slivers of continental crust, carried along by subducting ocean plates, were swept into the subduction zone and scraped onto North America’s western edge. For 270 million years, the effects of plate collisions were focused very near the edge of the North American plate boundary, far to the west of the Rocky Mountain region. It was not until 80 MA that these effects began to reach the Rockies. The current Rocky Mountains formed 80 million to 55 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny, in which the Kula plate began sliding underneath the North American plate. During the growth of the Rocky Mountains, the angle of the subducting plate may have been significantly flattened, moving the focus of melting and mountain building much farther inland than is normally expected. It is postulated that the shallow angle of the subducting plate greatly increased the friction and other interactions with the thick continental mass above it. Tremendous thrusts piled sheets of crust on top of each other, building the extraordinarily broad, high Rocky Mountain range. Immediately after the Laramide orogeny, the Rockies were like Tibet: a high plateau, probably 20,000 ft above sea level. In the last 60 million years, erosion stripped away the high rocks, revealing the ancestral rocks beneath, and forming the current landscape of the Rockies. Periods of glaciation occurred from the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million–70,000 years ago) to the Holocene Epoch (fewer than 11,000 years ago). The ice ages left their mark on the Rockies, forming extensive glacial landforms, such as U-shaped valleys and cirques. Recent glacial episodes included the Bull Lake Glaciation that began about 150,000 years ago and the Pinedale Glaciation that probably remained at full glaciation until 15,000–20,000 years ago.]
